Inside Trump’s Strange Iowa After-Party

WEST DES MOINES, IOWA—In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for Donald Trump to start his caucus day in Waterloo. Eight hours before Iowans would make their presidential preferences known—and ten hours before Trump would discover that, contrary to what his beloved polls said, he was not their first choice—he was in the eastern Iowa city of that name making his pitch to a three-quarters-filled convention hall. “It’s gonna be just a quickie,” Trump warned the crowd of about 700 people. He was soon due in Cedar Rapids, he explained, and he’d just been told that, because of a heavy fog, he’d have to drive there rather than fly. “So I’ll get the hell out of here fast,” he went on to approving laughter.

It was a rare wacky moment for Trump, who, as he stumped across Iowa in the final days before the caucuses, seemed to lose much of the antic energy—and even some of the demagoguery—that had so characterized his campaign since he announced his candidacy last June. Instead, Trump seemed to morph into the thing he (and his supporters) most despised: a conventional politician.

In Waterloo, that conventional approach took several forms. There was the gratuitous pander. “Your ethanol business if Ted Cruz gets in will be wiped out in six months to a year,” Trump told the crowd. “And as you know, the ethanol folks like Trump. I’ve been consistent. I’ve been solid. I’m a supporter and I always will be a supporter.” There was the appeal to family values. “Some rich people are not happy at all,” Trump said. “And so you’re saying, who’s the successful person? Somebody that’s really happy because of their family.” And there was, of course, the religious appeal. “And, by the way, believing in God?” Trump said. “So important.” Okay, maybe that last one was a bit Trumpian.

Before Trump spoke in Waterloo, Stephanie Laudner, the wife of Trump’s Iowa director, gave a brief introduction. “My husband and I have been doing politics for over thirty-some years,” she said, “and this is probably one of the better campaigns that we’ve been a part of.” It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. As The New York Times’s Trip Gabriel detailed several weeks ago, Trump’s ground game in Iowa was a mess. Indeed, one of the most striking differences between the Trump rallies I attended in the last week and those of other campaigns here was the number of volunteers: At events for Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, attendees were repeatedly approached by clipboard-toting campaign volunteers to secure caucus commitments; at Trump events, attendees were simply handed a small flyer reminding them to caucus.

And that’s assuming that they even could caucus—or wanted to. The other striking thing about Trump’s events was just how many of those who attended them either didn’t live in Iowa or didn’t support the candidate or both. At a Trump rally in Davenport one night, I sat next to a man who was visiting from Virginia. “I just wanted to see the show,” he explained. In Waterloo, I sat in between a yarmulke-wearing man from New Jersey (who was a Cruz supporter to boot) and an 18-year-old student from Emerson College in Boston who was in Iowa on a class trip. She assured me that the red “Make America Great Again” baseball hat, which she’d bought for $25 outside the rally, was being worn ironically. And in Cedar Rapids, my seatmates were an organic farmer from California, who had come to Iowa as a “political tourist,” and a mother and daughter from Cedar Rapids who both planned to caucus for Marco Rubio. “I like listening to him talk, and if I see him on TV I’ll stop on that channel,” the mother explained, “but I couldn’t vote for him in good faith.” Indeed, she said she’d spotted an acquaintance going into the event and hid from her—lest her friend think she was a Trump supporter.

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Even at Trump’s caucus-night party in West Des Moines, it wasn’t always easy to find actual Trump supporters. For every Leonard Overton—a 68-year-old Navy vet and first-time caucus-goer from Des Moines who voted for Trump—there was a Margy Lipovac, an elementary school teacher who voted for Carly Fiorina. “We figured Trump would have the best party,” Lipovac said, explaining why she came. “He’s like a fourth grader as far as I’m concerned, making faces and rude remarks.”

The presence of Lipovac and others like her at Trump’s caucus-night event might explain why his second-place finish was greeted with such remarkable equanimity inside the hotel ballroom. When it was announced over the PA system, which was carrying CNN, that Cruz had won, there were only a handful of boos. And as the televisions carried Rubio’s third-place speech, the crowd at times burst into applause—something I’ve never previously seen at an election-night after-party.

Finally, as we waited for Trump to make his own speech, I found one truly crestfallen Trump supporter: Tanya Wilson, a 40-year-old teacher’s aide who, after standing in line for three and a half hours to attend Trump’s debate-night rally at Drake University last week, decided to caucus for him. “I think Iowans are dumb,” Wilson vented. “I think they’re stupid and I think they don’t think very well.”

Wilson sounded a lot like Trump himself did last November, after Ben Carson had briefly tied him in the Iowa polls and he’d asked, “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” And it seemed possible, maybe even likely, that Trump would deliver a similarly scorched-earth speech after finishing second to Cruz. But when Trump came onto the ballroom stage, flanked by his wife and his three children with their spouses, he was nothing but magnanimous. “I absolutely love the people of Iowa,” Trump declared. “So we finished second, and I want to tell you something. I’m just honored, I’m really honored.” Trump congratulated Cruz and all of his other opponents and then thanked his own campaign team as well as his family. “We’re just so happy with the way everything worked out,” Trump said. He had done the impossible. Donald Trump had become a gracious loser.

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